Dane DeHaan on being boring off screen and kissing Daniel Radcliffe on screen

Poetry lover Daniel Radcliffe: “I have seen for myself how phenomenally talented Dane is. He will be working at the highest level for a long time and I’m excited to have met him so early in his career. The real proof though of the esteem I hold him in is that he’s in my fantasy football league this year... and I don’t let just anyone in!”

Dane DeHaan’s days as a relative unknown are numbered. It’s partly to do with kissing Daniel Radcliffe. “It was great, I guess,” says the actor of his onscreen smooch in Kill Your Darlings, John Krokidas’s dizzying debut feature about the birth of the beat generation. “If I were going into that scene thinking, ‘You’re about to kiss Daniel Radcliffe,’ I wouldn’t be doing my job. When we shot it, I was thinking, ‘I finally get to kiss the person that I love.’”

“If something doesn’t seem like it’s going to be impossible, then I’m not really interested in doing it”

DeHaan plays Lucien Carr, a Columbia University student who, before the story meets its bloody end, entices fellow freshman Allen Ginsberg (Radcliffe) into a highly sensory, mindbending world of Rimbaud poetry, copious drug use and late nights spent knocking about Greenwich Village. “I’m a lot more boring a person than the characters I get to play in movies,” insists DeHaan, who at 27 is already happily married and settled in New York. Though Krokidas is likely to disagree. “When I was done with my audition John said, ‘What are you doing in the next three months?’ And I said, ’Well, you tell me?’ Something about that attitude really sparked in him like, ‘Oh, this guy can play Lucien Carr.’”

Born in Pennsylvania to a family with no real acting heritage, his highly acclaimed breakout role was as a screwed-up 17-year-old trying to uncover the fate of his biological father (Ryan Gosling) in this year’s electric The Place Beyond the Pines. “I just really like complicated roles,” he says. “If something doesn’t seem like it’s going to be impossible, then I’m not really interested in doing it.”

DeHaan next appears as Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014 and James Dean in Anton Corbijn’s film Life – two roles coincidentally also inhabited by our cover star, James Franco, early in his career. As one of the most hyped young actors in Hollywood right now, you’d think DeHaan might muse critically over his work. But he doesn’t get too hung up on it, “as long as I keep giving it my all and pouring my whole body and soul into it. I’m sure that I fail sometimes, but ultimately the journey is just to try and figure this acting thing out.”